Having contributed as a staff writer at the Spencer Daily Reporter for just shy of a year, Seth Boyes joined the Dickinson County News staff in March of 2017. In his first week at the DCN, Seth covered a train derailment near Graettinger. The tankers carrying ethanol burst into flames. Seth's photo of the event won first place for Best Breaking News photo at the 2018 Iowa Newspaper Association Convention and Trade Show in February. He won a second Best Breaking News Photo award for a shot of the fire at Zippers Gentlemen's Club in April, and also won awards for Master Columnist and Best Blog. Boyes graduated from Iowa State University in 2009 with a degree in Integrated Studio Arts. His original cartoons run regularly in the Spencer Daily Reporter and the DCN. Both he and his wife Janet hail from Clear Lake and have come to expect summers to be full of the hustle and bustle of tourists and visitors.

In diurnarii veritas

Posted Friday, December 1, 2017, at 1:03 PM

If you've not heard of Project Veritas, it's safe to assume you probably will in the future. It's a group which claims to investigate the truth and expose corruption among various organizations and often takes aim at what many consider to be the mainstream media. In fact, the very word "veritas" is the latin for truth. As in "In vino veritas" which means, "In wine there is truth." The generally accepted meaning of the phrase is someone who has had a few is more likely to just come out and say what they really think, rather than filtering their words with any tact.

In other words, they do what you would expect.

What one would expect an organization called Project Veritas to do would be to perhaps disseminate truthful findings. And, in all honesty, that's what some people believe the organization does through their hidden camera interviews. But time and time again, the videos have been shown to be heavily edited and out of context. In my day, it was documentary filmmaker Michael Moore who was accused of editing footage to fit his message, rather than provide the truth. The folks at Project Veritas basically pull the same gag but, unlike Moore, they have the benefit of the reduced, modern-day, Youtube-induced attention span, so some don't give the editing a second thought.

But some need more than a two-minute video or a hastily posted meme to win them over. They are often skeptical and attempt to retrace the lines that someone has tried to color in for them. Some of them make a living being skeptical and inquisitive as journalists (or diurnarii, just to stick with the latin theme) and some have ended up in the crosshairs of the people at Project Veritas.

Many of us in today's online-based societal schism have taken on an us-versus-them mentality and, in that vein, the folks at Project Veritas allegedly hatched a plan. In an apparent attempt to prove "liberal" news sources like the Washington Post ignore facts in order to discredit conservative figures, they sent a member of their group to the paper in the guise of left-leaning citizen. The woman shared a manufactured account of conceiving a child with controversial Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and being coerced into having an abortion.

Obviously, that's one heck of a chunk of click-bait they had hanging on the hook there. Surely the liberal monster of a paper would snarf that hunk of juicy fantasy down and get it to print as soon as possible, before they realized the noble fishermen at Project Veritas were scooping them into their net for the public to see. However, you'll recall journalists are skeptical folk. It takes quite a bit to win some of them over and the diurnarii at the Post are skeptical enough to earn a living from it.

In other words, they do what you would expect.

The staff looked into their source and found her quite suspicious. They found a pole-full of red flags when skimming her social media pages, found she was using a false name and found she was a member of Project Veritas. The irony of using a false name when working for a organization called Project Veritas is just quintessential (another latin word I might add). Anyway, the staff eventually called her on it — having kept dutiful records of multiple encounters and interviews, of course, and literally watched her retreat back to the Project Veritas office.

By founding their sting on a perceived bias, the operative actually proved the news staff was doing their job and worthy of trust. The poetic irony abounds. Though, in a way, Project Veritas did indeed uncover truth and expose corruption, I suppose.

Yet, the problem persists.

Recently, Walmart had to pull a T-shirt which read "Rope. Tree. Journalist. SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED" from its website. That's the kind of problem we run into when a national chain allows third-party sales on its website, but it betrays an attitude among the public which is very real. We have fallen so far. We prefer those 2-minute snippets on our social media feeds to any full-length article. We trust in organizations that value truth as part of their letterhead rather than part of their everyday routine. Yet, the very people who have proven they value the truth — the diurnarii who put veritas to print, who don't take the bait, who lay out their trail of facts for us to follow with each edition — we threaten with tree and rope.

It would seem we're moving in a new direction. It would seem truth is not the concern any longer. It would seem our causes have usurped the need for veritas.